India - A Potential Superpower of Capabilities

“Equal consideration for all may demand very unequal treatment in favour of the disadvantaged.”

The idea of ‘capability’ can be contributory in comprehending the opportunity aspect of freedom and human rights. The capability based approach combats an over concentration on means  that can be revealed in some theories of justice. During India’s struggle for independence from the British Raj, Mahatma Gandhi famously refused the opportunity to be well fed when he chose to fast, as a form of revolt against their policies. In terms of the “actual functioning” of being well-nourished, he did not differ from a starving famine victim, but the freedoms and opportunities they respectively had were quite different. What a person is free to have, not just what he actually has, is relevant to a theory of justice. A theory of rights also has grounds to be involved with substantive freedoms.

Amartya Sen, in his ‘Capability Approach’ adopts a descriptive approach, to justice and the contrast between transcendental theories of justice, and comparative theories of justice. Criteria, which Sen also defines as “social notions”, “combining formula” , or “rules of social judgment”, include not only Rawls’s maximin, but also other features such as the “leximin”, or the efficiency of the social arrangement. While the “maximin” criterion is aimed at maximising the interests of the individual in the worse position, “leximin” strives towards first maximising the interests of the individual in the worse position, and then maximizing the interests of the second individual in the worse position, and so on.